Semantic foundations for generalized rewrite theories

Since its introduction, more than one decade ago, rewriting logic has attracted the interest of both theorists and practitioners, who have contributed in showing its generality as a semantic and logical framework and also as a programming paradigm. The experimentation conducted in these years has suggested that some significant extensions to the original definition of the logic would be very useful in practice. In particular, the Maude system now supports subsorting and conditional sentences in the equational logic for data, and also frozen arguments to block undesired nested rewrites; moreover, it allows equality and membership assertions in rule conditions. In this paper, we give a detailed presentation of the inference rules, model theory, and completeness of such generalized rewrite theories